Why 'Black Panther' And 'Monster Hunt 2' Are Both Box Office Game Changers

Black Panther wasn’t the only big movie making big box office history over this long weekend. Today is the Chinese New Year. As such we saw a bunch of big Chinese productions launching in China starting on Friday. And in those first three days of the Fri-Mon holiday, the films in the Chinese marketplace grossed a combined $506 million, including online ticketing fees. That is a record-breaking figure for a single weekend, well-and-above the $305m North American weekend of Dec. 18, 2015 when Star Wars: The Force Awakens earned $248m over its Fri-Sun debut.

And unlike our top weekend, this one had plenty of wealth being spread. This wasn’t one movie earning 81% of the total box office, but rather at least four big newbies earning otherwise huge opening weekend totals. Of note, Monster Hunt 2 earned $178.7 million over its Fri-Sun frame, which was a bit frontloaded considering its record-crushing $86m opening day. Detective Chinatown 2 earned $147.3m over its Fri-Sun debut, a solid 2.49x multiplier after a $59m opening day. Monkey King 3 earned $75.6m over the weekend after a $28m Friday and Operation Red Sea earned a $20m Friday and a $69m weekend.

So those four films made up $470 million of the total $506m Fri-Sun cume. And yes, to state the obvious, these were all Chinese productions with the sole and primary goal of making a lot of money in Chinese theaters. Three of the films had limited releases in North America this weekend, in a combined 219 theaters for a combined Fri-Sun gross of around $1.1 million. That’s no shade toward Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. (which distributed Detective Chinatown 2 to $677k), Lionsgate Premiere (which earned $335k from Monster Hunt 2) and WellGo USA (which grossed $91k from Monkey King 3), but this is the opposite of the standard Hollywood blockbuster performance. Hollywood may still need China, but for how long will China need Hollywood?

When a movie like Spider-Man: Homecoming opens in theaters around the world, the goal for success is for the big-budget (anywhere from $125-to-$250 million, depending on the project) movie to make a lot of money both in its native territory (North America) as well as the entire world. If the movie is cheap enough (like The LEGO Movie) or is a big enough deal in North America (like The Last Jedi), it doesn’t have to do the somewhat standard 35/65 domestic/overseas split to be a big hit. But that’s usually the goal. The likes of The Mummy, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them or Thor: Ragnarok depend on overseas box office, with an occasional emphasis on presumed riches found in China.

China is not the only territory that matters, but there is a lot of focus on this marketplace, currently the second-biggest moviegoing market in the world, due to its rapidly expanding theatrical footprint, an estimate 1.388 billion-person population and its relative appetite for conventional Hollywood franchise fare. But, as we’ve seen over the years, a big Hollywood movie can’t survive on China alone. Sure, if you’re the $40 million-budgeted Resident Evil: The Final Chapter or the $85m-budgeted xXx: Return of Xander Cage, you can flop in North America and still score huge via big ($160m+) bucks in China. But big-budget movies (Justice League, Transformers: The Last Knight, Star Trek Beyond, etc.) can’t survive on Chinese paydays alone if they bomb or underperform in North America and elsewhere. Notice how we're not getting a Warcraft 2 or Terminator Genisys 2.

Hollywood has often used China and related markets as an excuse to indulge in their worst habits, such as white male-centric casting, emphasis on mindless spectacle over storytelling, an “appealing to everyone” philosophy which can result in movies that sometimes appeal to no one. Many of the movies that truly broke big in China were critically-acclaimed (Life of Pi), culturally-specific (Coco), dialogue-driven (Captain America: Civil War) and rooted in culturally-specific characters and themes (Zootopia). Sure, Geostorm still made $65 million and they occasionally have a soft spot for grindhouse action movies like London Has Fallen, but don’t we all? And besides, $65m for Geostorm wasn’t nearly enough to save the $120m weather-carnage thriller. But what we’ve seen in the last two years is two-fold.

First, China’s reaction to a given Hollywood biggie is getting harder to predict. Sure, Fate of the Furious made $392 million in China, which is a record for an import. But Transformers: The Last Knight flamed out, with a Warcraft-worthy $228m which was a disaster for Paramount when the Michael Bay sequel underperformed almost everywhere else as well. Meanwhile, Pixar’s Coco earned more in China ($189m) than every other Pixar movie combined, while Jumanji earned a “just good enough” $78m, which was fine since Sony’s $90m sequel had already earned $377m in North America alone. The notion of China swooping in to save an underperforming biggie, or giving an automatic shot in the arm to a popular franchise offering, was always something of a myth.

Second, China is swimming in franchises of their own. Monster Hunt 2 is a sequel to 2015’s Monster Hunt, which earned $385 million in China alone to become their biggest-grossing movie. Since then, Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid made $526m in China and Wu Jing’s Wolf Warrior 2 earned a jaw-dropping $854m in China alone late this summer, good for the second-biggest market total for any movie save for The Force Awakens’ $937m North American gross. With figures like these, and with sequels to the likes of Monster Hunt and Detective Chinatown posting huge numbers, China needs Hollywood blockbusters less than Hollywood blockbusters need China. There may come a time when Hollywood franchise fare could become as boutique in China as the domestic theaters showing Monster Hunt 2.

These films are cheap enough to not have to appeal outside of China. Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan’s The Foreigner, produced by STX and Wanda (among others), was arguably the first successful Chinese/American co-production to qualify as a hit in both territories ($34 million in America/$81m in China). Because the R-rated Martin Campbell-directed thriller only cost $35m, it was a hit before it opened in North America. These films, unlike Legendary and Universal’s $150m+ The Great Wall, don’t have to pander to outside markets or strive to be inoffensive and generically appealing to global audiences. As these distinctly Chinese movies became able to approximate conventional Hollywood thrills, the so-called genuine article may become increasingly irrelevant to the very marketplace that is about to be the world’s biggest territory.

That may be hyperbole, as Chinese audiences clearly have a fondness for certain Hollywood franchises, such as the MCU and the Fast and Furious series. But as we see more and more “made in China and made for China” blockbuster-y franchises doing their thing mostly within said marketplace, Hollywood won’t be able to count on their big-budget IP scoring in that key territory, even if they do well in North America and much of the world. As I’ve said before, the key was and is making good films that appeal to American audiences, as that seems to be a mostly winning formula. But in the near future, as China focuses on their own franchise-friendly fare that provides big bucks every year, that may be the only formula that works.

Or we could just get Black Panther v Monkey King: Animal Anarchy in February of 2021.

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